Devonian

‘We need to go deeper,’ she says, marching into the forest. It’s quiet, as if we were underwater. The air is cool and moist. Ferns stretch their feathery leaves like lazy barnacles reaching out for plankton. Pine cones and pine needles crackle under our feet.

I can’t believe we are doing this. She used to be so rational. At bedtime, she would tell us stories about evolution and mass extinctions, about oceans teeming with ammonites. Once she told us how the continents used to be a single landmass and, one day, they would collide again. My brother and I liked to imagine our beds as tectonic plates on a collision course. M sat on the Eurasian plate while I rode Australia.

We used to be embarrassed by her strong foreign accent when she came to get us from school. I still remember the taste of the greasy dumplings stuffed with mashed potatoes and cottage cheese that she would force on us at the bus stop, as if we’d been starved all day. Now I look at her grey hair and sunken chest and think maybe it’s for the best. Perhaps she doesn’t believe this will work either, but what do we have to lose?

We reach a small clearing. The air is much warmer here, dry and filled with buzzing insects. Small brown lizards hide under twigs and stones as we cross a sandy patch. We always knew better than to ask her about our father. She must have had her reasons to run away from him with two little boys, leaving her lab technician job to become a cleaner. Only once, when we got drunk together at M’s birthday picnic on the beach outside our new town, did M ask her what he was like. Solemn and composed, she told us, ‘He was a very charming and very selfish man.’

Her eyes are as tired and determined as on the day M died. My forty-year-old little brother lay there on a hospital bed hooked up to an IV, with skinny arms and sunken eye sockets, a pale memory of the person he used to be. He told us this state is nothing less than freedom. He held my hand and asked, ‘Remember when I was Eurasia, and you were Australia?’

I wonder what the house will look like. We joked it would be a witch’s hut, with a thatched roof and bundles of herbs hanging in the porch, but it might be a fancy villa built on hope. I can’t be sure this is the right direction. She treads dauntlessly over the moss and sweeps away cobwebs with her cane, but I bet she’s putting on a brave front. I wouldn’t dare ask her how much further or whether she even knows where we’re going.

Maybe we’ll get attacked by a wild animal and die before we get there. Our bones will be cleaned of flesh by insects, worms, and small mammals. White and naked, our skeletons will sink deeper into the moss, under blankets of pine needles and autumn leaves, among the roots of generations of trees. Minerals from the soil might turn them to stone, buried deep under layers and layers of dust, with a kaleidoscope of forests and deserts and meadows and lakes high above on the surface. If members of a sentient race of robots excavate them millions of years from now, will they find the tumours on my mother’s bones?

The forest gets denser and darker, the ferns ever wilder. It seems to have no end or beginning, stretching endlessly in all directions with its pines and spruces and birches, with groundcover sewn from moss and heather and studded with mushrooms. We can almost hear the distant murmur of tectonic plates.

As we go deeper into the belly of the forest, full of insatiable flora and relentless fauna, I imagine she holds me and strokes my head as if I were five again. I imagine she tells me she’s going to be fine, she always is. If she survived our father, she can survive anything. Instead she just stops, looks around and says, ‘We are lost.’